Lucky Duck Games

Tower defense games are games where you build towers to shoot and kill approaching hordes of monsters, traveling along a winding path towards your home castle. They are pretty fun as digital games. As tabletop games they often lack something to spice up that simple mechanism, and keeping track of every monsters health is annoying as well. Enter Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time by Lucky Duck Games. It solves both problems with a really clever twist. The monsters attacking come as entire hordes printed on square cards, and instead of dealing numeric damage to them your towers fire different shapes of tiles. When you cover all monsters on a card, you may remove it. This adds an interesting puzzle component to the game since you obviously want to cover the monsters with as few shots as possible. As a second twist, in order to upgrade a tower you have to pass it to one of the other players – Kingdom Rush is a coop game – instead of using it this round. This one I like.

Quined Games

In the second preview for bronze age worker placement game Terramara Quined Games introduces the game’s new twist on worker placement. Two workers can go on the same action space, but the second workers’s owner must be higher on the military track than the first one’s. At the same time, placing your worker on the same space as another reduces your military strength. Military strength also decides how much loot you take from other players in a raid, so it’s a resource you want to use wisely. Making the worker placement even more interesting is that each player has one Chief worker that doesn’t allow any other workers on the same space, regardless of position on the military track. Those things together will make for some fun decisions to be sure.

Czech Games Edition

With a teaser that is as bombastic as it is mysterious Czech Games Edition have announced their next game this week: Sanctum by Filip Neduk. Sanctum is “inspired by classic hack-and-slash, monster slaying and loot grabbing video game RPG goodness”. Kill monsters, get loot, kill bigger monsters, keep going. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a Diablo-style boardgame with a clever dice mechanism where your gear can manipulate your dice. I, for one, strongly approve.

FryxGames / Stronghold Games

Terraforming Mars keeps being awesome, and with each expansion it becomes awesome in new, exciting ways. With Turmoil, the newest expansion, Mars turns political. The Terraforming Committee has six parties with different policies, and through the new lobbying action players control who rules Mars. Each party has a bonus that rewards players for having tags aligned with the party’s goals, and they have a policy that makes modifies the rules of the game in some small way. Manipulating the committee in your favor creates a whole new level of strategy in an already strategic game. You’ll also have to deal with impactful global events. Fortunately, you’ll know about those three rounds in advance and have time to prepare. With everything new going on, Turmoil is an expansion for experienced players.

Red Raven Games

Ryan Laukat returns to the world of his Above and Below and Near and Far once more. A mysterious sickness has gripped that world in Roam. It puts its victims to sleep and makes them sleepwalk out in the wilderness. Your job will be to find and wake them. You start the search mission with a few adventurers. Each of them has a search pattern. When you activate an adventurer you may place search markers on landscape cards in exactly that pattern. When all spaces on a card are marked, the player who put the most markers there finds the adventurer that has been wandering there. Adventurers are worth points, but they also join your search team and add a new search pattern to your repertoire. Roam seems lighter than Ryan’s other games, but it has all the same whimsical charm.

Z-Man Games

I bet most of us remember Choose Your Own Adventure books from our childhood. If you don’t, go to the next sentence, if you do go to the one after that. Choose Your Own Adventure books are books where you read a paragraph or two, then you make a decision, and depending on your decision you turn to a different page to see how the story continues. Z-Man Games have already adapted one of those books in Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger. There’s a big supply of those books to mine, and the next one to turn into a modern board game is War With The Evil Power Master, a space adventure for nothing less than the fate of the galaxy. Thinking about those books makes me nostalgic. I might be exactly the target audience for these games.

Eagle-Gryphon Games

If I had to sum up Vital Lacerda’s games in just a few words, those words might be “circular dependencies”. It’s typical for his games that you want to do A before B, B before C, C before A, and you have to decide where to break into the cycle. That’s why I think this passage from the Kickstarter page of On Mars, his newest game, sums it up best:

That’s exactly what I expected when Vital makes a game about colonizing Mars, and you have no idea how much I want to have it.

Mindclash Games

Anachrony is easily one of the most uncommon worker placement games ever. Involving time travel in your game design does that. Sending resources back in time to boost your options on earlier turns, that’s a strategic option you haven’t tried before. And with Fractures of Time, the expansion currently on Kickstarter, your options become even stranger. Instead of placing a new worker you’ll be able to Blink a worker already on the board to a new location. That technology is not perfect, however. The more often you use it, the more temporal glitches will disrupt your plans. Fractures of Time also has a new faction, the Path of Unity, a union of outcasts from the other paths come from the future to unite the other paths. Time travel, man. Always making things confusing. The additional faction does not mean you can play with five players, but that’s the only complaint I can think of.

This week’s featured photo was taken by Guy Fawkes – at least, that’s his Flick username – in the Škocjan Caves in Slovenia. Those caves encompass around six kilometers of underground passages and one of the world’s largest underground chambers. Thanks for sharing this photo, Guy!(IMG_8058, Guy Fawkes, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)

Tweet the Meeple

Older Reviews

Metropolys – easily recognised as one of Ystari’s games by the trademark Y – is an auction game with not too complex rules but some interesting scoring trade-offs. It also features a very unique and appealing artistic style.

Share this:

Like this:

Mord im Arosa is a very, very unusual mystery game. There is no deduction element at all and neither are you supposed to hide your identity. Instead, the whole game is about listening where the clue cubes land in the tower when they are dropped in.
Unusual? Yes. Fun? Find out.

Share this:

Like this:

A black-and-white scene. A gloomy office, a frosted glass door. Dusk is falling onto the metropolis outside the windows, police sirens and unidentifiable scents wavering through the reddening light of night falling. Behind the desk sits a man in shirts and trench coat, his hat on the wardrobe next to the door. A private eye by trade and complexion. Suddenly, a knock on the door, it opens and a stunning woman with a red dress and an air of titillation enters… that’s a typical day in the life of a classic film noir detective, and one that you can participate in when playing Martin Wallace’s P.I.

Share this:

Like this:

Goblins no have bombs. That no good. Goblins need bombs. You Goblins will see bombs, will look at bombs, will learn bombs? Why? Because Big Boss Necromancer Goblin say, that why. Go learn bomb, not worry if bomb explode, Big Boss bring you back, no problem.

Share this:

Like this:

Some countries just don’t manage to form a stable government, but the unnamed kingdom of Council of Four is ridiculous even by those standards. Influential merchants, the players, exchange councilmen in any way that best serves their interest. If the current council can’t be bullied into writing a business permit, they just replace them. And whoever does that best wins the game.

Share this:

Like this:

Every year Fragor Games releases one game, designed by the Lamont brothers and produced with ridiculously pretty ceramic miniatures. Last year, that game was A Game of Gnomes. It’s what it says on the box: a game, and about gnomes. Except the title and some puns in the rule book, it has nothing to do with that other A Game of …. Something that everyone is talking about, but it has a lot to do with mushrooms. And it has the largest single component in any game we have here at the Meeple Cave.

Share this:

Like this:

You don’t often have 25 players to fit into one game. But when you do, what are you going to do? Name one single game that fits that many people and doesn’t involve drinking. Well, we have one for you now.

Share this:

Like this:

In 1620, a ship full of brave meeples set sail to cross the ocean and build a new life in the new world. These meeples who crossed the ocean on the Keyflower built a number of settlements competing for everything, including the buildings their settlements may have. In their first year, these meeples created their new lives.